Any hopes, however remote, that 2016 might bring relief from the troubling phishing trends prevalent in 2015 have been conclusively dashed by a thorough analysis of malware threats in the first quarter of this year. Not only has phishing intensified, but it’s also increasingly used to deliver ransomware.

When people refer to PhishMe as the awareness company, we smile and nod. I want to correct them, but the label ‘security awareness’ is comfortable and relatable. One of the activities that organizations commonly believe will help reduce risk is mandatory security awareness computer-based training (CBT) lessons. The hope is that if we enroll our humans in online courses about how the bad guys hack us, they will walk away with a wealth of new-found awareness and avoid being victimized. (Try to visualize how far in the back of my head my eyes are rolling…)

Every year PhishMe Simulator sends millions of phishing emails to its 500+ enterprise customers’ employees worldwide. PhishMe is hands down the most robust and sophisticated phishing platform in existence. To say that we are a little obsessive about Phishing is a bit of an understatement. In fact, we are sitting on innovations in phishing that the bad guys have yet to figure out.

The difference in PhishMe emails versus the bad guys, is that ours are carefully crafted to deliver a memorable experience. Our experiences are masterfully designed to change human behavior to avoid phishing. So what happens when one of our own employees is on the receiving end of a wire fraud phish? Read on…

For those who may have lost track of time, it’s 2015, and phishing is still a thing. Hackers are breaking into networks, stealing millions of dollars, and the current state of the Internet is pretty grim.

We are surrounded with large-scale attacks, and as incident responders, we are often overwhelmed, which creates the perception that the attackers are one step ahead of us. This is how most folks see the attackers, as being a super villain who only knows evil, breathes evil, and only does new evil things to trump the last evil thing.

This perception leads to us receiving lots of questions about the latest attack methods. Portraying our adversaries as being extremely sophisticated, powerful foes makes for a juicy narrative, but the reality is that attackers are not as advanced as they are made out to be.

The recent Carefirst breach is just the latest in a rash of large-scale healthcare breaches, but the prevailing notion in the aftermath of this breach is that it isn’t as severe as the Anthem or Premera breaches that preceded it. The thinking is that the victims of this breach dodged a bullet here, since attackers only accessed personal information such as member names and email addresses, not more sensitive information like medical information, social security numbers, and passwords. However, attackers may still be able to use this partial information in a variety of ways, and a partial breach should not be dismissed as trivial.

While the full implications from yesterday’s DoJ indictment of five Chinese hackers on charges of cyber crime are yet to be fully seen, these charges have already succeeded in elevating cyber crime from a niche discussion to an important debate in society at-large.

Furthermore, just as last year’s APT1 report did, the court documents provide a detailed glimpse at the tactics China is using to steal trade secrets from the world’s largest corporations (not surprisingly, phishing continues to be the favored attack method).

There has been a lot of media attention on this story, so we’ve put together a list of some of the most interesting content we’ve seen so far:

Canary, the leading-edge v36 of the Google Chrome browser, includes a new feature that attempts to make malicious websites easier to identify by burying the URL and moving the domains from the URI/URL address bar (known in Chrome as the “Omnibox”) into a location now known as “Origin Chip”. In theory, this makes it easier for users to identify phishing sites, but we’ve discovered a major oversight that makes the reality much different.

Canary is still in beta, but a flaw that impacts the visibility of a URL is typically something we only see once every few years. We’ve discovered that if a URL is long enough, Canary will not display any domain or URL at all, instead showing an empty text box with the ghost text “Search Google or type URL.” While Canary is intended to help the user identify a link’s true destination, it will actually make it impossible for even the savviest users to evaluate the authenticity of a URL.

At PhishMe, we feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of debunking the idea that you can address the spear phishing threat using the pentest model, but after reading this Washington Post story about a phishing test gone awry, it looks like we still have some work to do.

In this test, an Army combat commander sent an email to a “small group” of Army employees disguised as an email from their retirement plan provider urging them to log in to their accounts. The email used the name of Thrift Savings Plan, the actual 401(k) account provider for most federal employees, and provided no indication that it was a simulated phishing exercise, causing a panic across the DoD as concerned recipients shared the email with colleagues and flooded the Thrift Savings Plan customer support line. It took nearly three weeks for the Pentagon to trace the origin of the email.

2014 was PhishMe’s 3rd year at RSA. Our growing team allowed me to steal a few hours away from the Exhibit floor and attend some excellent sessions. While many of the sessions I attended related to PhishMe’s offering I also made it a point to take a break and enjoy some fringe topics. A talk entitled: “The Dark Web and Silk Road” with Thomas Brown, Deputy Chief for Cyber, U.S. Attorney’s Office of Southern New York was a fascinating view into how Bitcoin is used in illicit underground marketplaces. The presentation was well-done and a great play by play about how the man behind Silk Road was unmasked and arrested.

Last week, we discussed how attackers can steal credentials without using malware through data-entry phishing. While this tactic is a common and highly effective technique, the latest report on Target alleges that Citadel, a password-stealing derivative of the ZeuS banking Trojan, was responsible for stealing login credentials from Target vendor Fazio Mechanical, which provided attackers with the foothold they needed in Target’s network.